Talks are already available as videos. Hundreds of photos have been uploaded to social networks. 2000+ tweets[tw] with the FOSSASIA hashtag were posted during the event.

FOSSASIA Summit 2017 Highlights

The three-day program with nearly 20 parallel tracks made FOSSASIA Summit the biggest open tech event in the region. One very interesting fact was the entire conference was fully managed by FOSSASIA built open source event management system, EventYay. All the technical setting was also done in-house by the FOSSASIA Team. In the effort of making the event the best experience for visitors, FOSSASIA team organized a series of extracurricular activities including pre-event meet&greet, pub crawl, culture walk, social event, see you again cocktails, and a lucky draw.

Day 1 Opening Day with Keynotes

Chan Cheow Hoe, GovTech’s Chief Information Officer, emphasized how the Singapore Government’s central information technology systems and infrastructure drive the development and delivery of innovative public services for citizens and businesses.

Chan Cheow Hoe, GovTech’s CIO, photo by Nguyen Thi Tra My

Follow-up by an interesting story by Øyvind Roti who currently leads Google’s international team of Cloud Architects. He spoke about how to get involved and contribute to the Google CloudOpen Source products and related projects, including machine learning, systems, client-side libraries and data analytics tools.

Øyvind Roti, photo by Gabriel Lee

Andrey Terekhov brought Microsoft into the Open Source picture with some insights that many were not aware of. MS actually are the top contributors to Github and they are hosting many Open Source projects themselves. Andrey explained in details Microsoft’s open source strategy and developing business in Asia Pacific region, with a particular focus on scaling up open source workloads on Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

The final keynote of the day was conducted by a German privacy activist – Frank Karlitschek the founder of ownCloud and later Nextcloud, an open source and fully federated and distributed network for files and communication. As the topic of the privacy and personal data on the internet are under attack by hackers and international espionage programs, Frank shared with the audience how the Internet can be used as a free and democratic medium again.

Open Source AI Topics

The highlight of the day was the introduction of SUSI AI – FOSSAISA’s Open Source Personal Assistant. Michael Christen, founder and also core developer talked about SUSI’s current development stage as well as project’s ambition and the plan for the future. He demonstrated some amazing things you can do with SUSI such as searching for locations, finding translations in over 100 languages, asking SUSI travel information, weather etc. One of the exciting features is the auto-improvement ability: the more you interact with SUSI, the better and accurate its answers become. Michael also showed the audience how they can actually contribute and create the largest corpus of knowledge for SUSI AI Assistant.

Liling Tan, a data scientist from Rakuten, spoke about Natural Language Processing (NLP) which is the task of the computationally understanding and production of human languages, often using a mix of hand-crafted rules and machine learning techniques. Konrad Willi Döring brought AI to next level when he presented the Brainduino Project including a brief introduction to EEG-based brain-computer interfaces as well as a look into the future of BCI technology.

Konrad Willi Döring Brainduino Project, photo by Michael Cannon

FOSSASIA’s favorite speaker, Andrew “bunnie” Huang, came back with “Let’s Make Technology more Inclusive”. Bunnie and his team examined some of the cultural and technological barriers that have stymied inclusiveness, using gender imbalance as a case study. They later on, proposed a solution called “Love to Code”, which attempts to address the issue of inclusiveness in technology.

From September 2016 to February 2017, FOSSASIA held a CodeHeat contest to encourage more developers to get involved and contribute to the FOSSASIA open source projects, namely Open Events Orga Server, AskSUSI project, and LokLak. 442 developers had joined the contest, over a thousand pull requests were made during over this 6 months period of CodeHeat. Three winners and two finalists from the top 10 contributors who have contributed awesome code were chosen to fly to Singapore for the FOSSASIA Summit 2017 to share what they’ve done, and meet the open source community gathered here.

CodeHeat Award Ceremony, photo by Michael Cannon

PubCrawl

A get-together at Pubcrawl has become a tradition of every FOSSASIA Summit. At the end of the first day, speakers and participants met at Chinatown and started a fun evening strolling around various pubs, tasting local beverages and specialties. The hang-out has always been a great opportunity for speakers to carry on their unfinished conversations during the day as well as to enhance the friendship among visitors and residents.

Open Tech – Google Open Source Track

Stephanie Taylor, the Program Manager at Google Open Source Outreach team gave an educational talk about Google Code-in program as an early opening of the Google’s Open Tech Track. This introduction was favored by local students as well as young international developers. In the following topic about Future of the Web, Anuvrat Rao introduced the latest open technology to address critical user needs on the open web.

Stephanie Taylor and GCI 2016 Students

Andrew Selle from Google Brain Team carried on the session with an overview of the open source software library TensorFlow and discussed how the open source community has shaped its development and success. Devan Mitchem introduced The Chromebook, a new, faster computer that offers thousands of apps. He also showed the audience how to integrate and experience Android apps on this machine for greater productivity and flexibility. Denis Nek wrapped up Google’s Tracks by a talk about Model–view–viewmodel (MVVM), a software architectural pattern. In this last topic, he explained why and how he could solve many common problems of android developers using this approach.

Tech Kids Track

Followed up the success of 2016’s summit, FOSSASIA 2017 extended Tech Kids Track throughout its 3-day event. Many parents brought their kids along to attend the talks and workshops. Most importantly, these young attendees showed their great interest in Open Technology. The kids’ voluntary participation in the tracks completed the aim of FOSSASIA in fostering education at a young age. With the power of open knowledge, we believe the bright future of world leaders start from today’s education.

Elda Webb and Creativity workshop, photo by Ka Ho Ying

Kids workshops covered topics such as Git for beginners, software translation with WebLate, PyGame 101 Codelab, how to developer your first mobile app, make a DIY paper spectrometer, create a promotion video with open source tools etc.

This fun and educational workshop was organized by Microsoft Open Source Team. In this rescue mission, attendees learned to create a bot using an open source framework and tools. They were given access to MS code repositories and other technical resources. Workshop participants had to complete 3 missions and 2 code challenges in order to bring the Mars mission back on track. It was pretty challenging but at the same time super exciting.

Mission Mars’ Winner and Mentors

Python Track

Python Track has always attracted good audience’s response since 2015. In this year summit, the track covered very informative topics ranging from metaclasses in Python 2 and 3, computing using Cython to Go-lang (a new open source programming language), Pygame 101, the effective use of python in Science and Maths with live demos of successful experiments etc.

PyGame 101 Codelab Workshop

A 2-hour workshop was conducted by Kushal Das giving the audience the overview of MicroPython, how to update NodeMCU devices with MicroPython firmware and using sensors with NodeMCU for their first IoT device.

MicroPython workshop using NodeMCUPython Mentors, photo by Ka Ho Ying

Database Track – PostgreSQL Day

This was the second year FOSSASIA hosted PGDay. We were delighted to welcome amazing speakers like Dr. Michael Meskes (founder and CEO of credativ Group), Maksym Boguk (co-founder of PostgreSQL consulting), and many other PostgreSQL developers and consultants across the globe.

It was very interesting to learn how an open source database, PostgreSQL, has rapidly extended its application into the enterprise sector, one of the examples was how PostGIS is being by agricultural producer in Australia.

PGDay at FOSSASIA Summit 2017

Day 3 More sessions and the final keynote by Daimler’s Representatives

It was wonderful to have two special guests from Daimler headquarter in Stuttgart – Jan Michael Graef (CFO of CASE) and Vlado Koljibabic (leads IT for the new CASE business and COO of the Digital and IT organization). The presence of Daimler, a traditional corporate business in the open source world was not only well received by the audience but also triggered an excitement and the curiosity of the crowd: What is the background of the growing involvement and support of Open Source by Daimler?

Daimler AG is known for one of the world’s most successful automotive companies. With its Mercedes-Benz Cars, Daimler Trucks, Mercedes-Benz Vans, Daimler Buses, and Daimler Financial Services divisions. The Group is one of the leading global suppliers of premium cars and is the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial vehicles. At FOSSASIA Summit 2017, Jan and Vlado made an introduction to CASE – these letters will shape the future of Mercedes-Benz Cars. They stand for the strategic pillars of connectivity (Connected), autonomous driving (Autonomous), flexible use (Shared & Services) and electric drive systems (Electric), which will be intelligently combined with one another by the company.

In their talk Vlado and Jan outlined how Daimler recognizes the power of Open Source development and we had the chance to get insights into some very exciting ideas how Daimler is planning to shape the logistics sector with services based on Open Source technologies. The company is even considering cryptocurrency payments for services in the future and is already working on using Blockchain technologies for its automobile services for logistics companies.

Web & Mobile Track – featured OpenEvent (EventYay) System

Finally, there is an Open Source event management system said Mario Behling, founder of open-event (eventyay) and the summit’s co-organiser. During the last two years, the FOSSASIA team has been working on a complete functional open source solution for event organisers. More than 5,000 commits have been made from more than 100 developers worldwide. The hosted solution of the application is available at EventYay.com and ready to be tested as an Alpha product.

The system enables organizers to manage events from concerts to conferences and meet-ups. It offers features for events with several tracks and venues. Event managers can create invitation forms for speakers, build schedules in a drag and drop interface, implement ticketing system and much more. The event information is stored in a database. The system also provides API endpoints to fetch the data, and to modify and update it. Organizers can import and export event data in a standard compressed file format that includes the event data in JSON and binary media files like images and audio.

OpenEvent Scheduler – Drag & Drop interface

The Open-event core team of 7 senior developers came together at the FOSSASIA summit to showcase the latest development, make live demos, conduct deployment workshops and discuss future applications.

Featured Open Event presentations and workshops:

Better Events with Open Event | Mario Behling

Deploy Open Event Organizer Server | Saptak Sengupta

Scaling Open Event Server with Kubernetes | Niranjan Rajendran

Open Event API | Avi Aryan

Open Event Web App | Aayush Arora

An Introduction to the Open Event Android Project and it’s capabilities| Manan Wason

Agile Workflow and Best Practices in the Open Event Android App Generator Project | Harshit Dwivedi

This year FOSSASIA proudly hosted MySQL Day within the database track. 12 senior developers/speakers from Oracle around the world got together at the summit. 14 scheduled talks and workshop were conducted. Beginning with Sanjay Manwani, MySQL Director from India, he talked about ‘the State of the Dolphin’, sharing an overview of the recent changes in MySQL and the direction for MySQL 8 as well as an introduction to Oracle cloud. The day continued with selective topics from MySQL optimizer features to in-depth workshops such as MySQL operations in Docker – workshop or MySQL Performance Tuning.

Additionally, Ricky Setyawan organized an unconference session or a MySQL Community Meetup Space where he invited the community members to meet and to start a direct conversation with MySQL’s developers.

See you again Cock-Tails

After the closing session, FOSSASIA attendees were invited by Daimler to join an after-event cocktail party. People were happy for the chance to finish up their discussions while enjoying the nice view of the city from a spacious balcony with finger food, drinks and good music from the local band.

Exhibition and Networking Space at FOSSASIA Summit

The biggest goal of the FOSSASIA Summit is to bring people across borders together at a physical space where they can freely share, showcase, discuss and collaborate on existing projects or new ideas. We are happy to see many open source communities across Asia at this year’s gathering. What could be better than a face-to-face discussion over coffee with people who shared the same vision and belief: ‘With open technologies, we can make the world a better place’

FOSSASIA What’s Next?

Mark your calendar for the next FOSSASIA Summit, which will take place in March 2018. We are looking forward to seeing you again in Singapore. If you are meetup organizers, community leaders, we would like to invite you to host a track at the next FOSSASIA Summit, please write to us about your experience and contribution in the open source world via [email protected]

As always thanks to Michael Cheng and Engineers.SG team for all the videos, thanks to our photographers Michael Cannon, Ka Ho Ying and the team for capturing some of the very best moment of us. You can search for more photos by typing #fossasia on loklak (or alternatively on Twitter) or Flickr. If you also want to share photos you took during the summit, please add them to the group pool.

During three days, thousands of developers, technologists, scientists, entrepreneurs and artists get together to showcase latest technologies, communicate, exchange ideas, learn from each other, and collaborate. Topics range from information technology and Open Source software development to hardware and maker projects, open design tools, machine learning, DevOps, knowledge tools, and citizen science.

For our 2017 feature event we are looking for speaker submissions for the following tracks:

Apart from the conference program, the FOSSASIA Summit offers an exhibition space for company and project stands and areas for community assemblies, and developer meetings.

Submission Guidelines

Please propose your session as early as possible and include a description of your session proposal that is as complete as possible. The description is of particular importance for the selection. Once accepted, speakers will receive a code for a speakers ticket. Please indicate on the submissions form if you would like to apply for a sponsored community ticket.

Sessions and Tracks

Talks and Workshops
Talk slots are 20 minutes long plus 5-10 minutes for questions and answers. You can also sign up for either a 1-hour long or a 2-hours workshop. Longer sessions are possible in principle. Please tell us the proposed length of your session at the time of submission.

Lightning talks
You have some interesting ideas but do not want to submit a full talk? We suggest you go for a lightning talk which is a 5 minutes slot to present your idea or project. You are welcome to continue the discussion in break out areas. There are tables and chairs to serve your get-togethers.

Stands and assemblies
We offer spaces in our exhibition area for companies, community projects, installations, workshops, team gatherings and other fun activities. We are curious to know what you would like to make, bring or show. Please add details in the submission form.

Developer Rooms/Track Hosts
Get in touch early if you plan to organize a developer room at the event. FOSSASIA is also looking for team members who are interested to co-host and moderate tracks. Please sign up to become a host here.

Publication

Audio and video recordings of the lectures will be published in various formats under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. This license allows commercial use by media institutions as part of their reporting. If you do not wish for material from your lecture to be published or streamed, please let us know in your submission.

Sponsorship & Contact

If you would like to sponsor FOSSASIA or have any questions, please contact us via [email protected]

Do not miss this opportunity to explore the wonder of Science, to team up with inspiring people around you and to enjoy the amazing working facilities at Suntec City. Join our event on facebook for further announcement.

What is Science Hack Day?

Science Hack Day is a two-day event where anyone excited about making weird, silly or serious things with science comes together in the same physical space to see what they can prototype. Designers, developers, scientists and anyone who is excited about making things with science are welcome to attend – no experience in science or hacking is necessary, just an insatiable curiosity. Recommended age is 13 and up, though younger students are welcome to attend, with parental accompaniment.

The mission of Science Hack Day is to get excited and make things with science! People organically form multidisciplinary teams over the course of a weekend: particle physicists team up with designers, marketers join forces with open source rocket scientists, writers collaborate with molecular biologists, and developers partner with school kids. By collaborating on focused tasks during this short period, small groups of hackers are capable of producing remarkable results.